[Galene] Re: Galene HTTP API error and various feedback

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

Hello Thimothée, nice to meet you.

> 1. Its not written in the documentation that the API authentication is
> actually using Basic Auth, its a small thing but I had to dive in into
> galenectl code to understand that

Thanks, I'll fix that at the next opportunity.

> 2. I'd really like to be able to directly pass the admin-username and
> admin-password or directly an admin-api-key when launching ./galene, this
> will allow projects that wraps Galene like mine to not have to deal with
> galenectl and its custom file and generate a random username/password or
> api-key each time galene is launched.

That's something you could easily script:

    #!/bin/sh

    set -e
    umask 0077

    pw="$(dd if=/dev/random bs=8 count=1 | base64)"

    sed "s/@PASSWORD@/$pw/" < /etc/galene.conf.template > /tmp/galene.conf
    galene -c /tmp/galene.conf

So I'm not too keen to add code that I'm going to have to maintain forever
just to avoid a few lines of shell.  Is there any reason why you need this
to be done within the server itsef?

> 3. For projects that wrap Galene it would also be interesting if the API
> calls and open Websockets requests could be restricted to the local
> machine only (to prevent so security issues if the API is unfortunatelly
> exposed publicly).

That's a good idea.  Could you please file a github issue?

> 4. I'm not there yet but it seems that each "user" have to create
> a dedicated Websocket (see
> https://galene.org/galene-protocol.html#connecting) when wrapping Galene
> server side. This means that the wrapper will have to maintain dozens of
> Websockets. Would it be possible to provide a "admin" Websocket where all
> the messages are sent through it (with a specific user id to differenciate
> them) ?

It's a lot of work, and will require some protocol changes.  It is planned
to do that when (if?) I implement server federation.

Could you please describe exactly what you're doing, so I can think about
it some more?

-- Juliusz